Holography Costs Have Come Down Enough that the Rich Can Start to Play

Resurrect the Beatles, Jesus, or yourself.

In 2012, a shimmering Tupac took the stage at Coachella and caught the attention of Alkiviades David, heir to Coke bottling fortune and general rich person. David pulled the rich person move of buying the underlying patent that allowed Tupac to walk again, and since that time, the holography enthusiast has been working to resurrect other entertainers.

That you could have Mr. Christ Himself rendered in CGI giving a sermon might seem a little hokey, though it’s hard to argue that someone won’t try. (The Passion of the Christ, for instance, turned viewers into box office wine.) Less cynically, taking holograms beyond pure entertainment, as the Buddha statues demonstrate, can be incredibly powerful:

Holographic projection-as-monument isn’t a topic that David really dives into (statues, animated or not, aren’t exactly a sexy pitch) but it’s an idea that has long legs in fiction. For a slightly absurd example, look no further than Community’s immortalization of dead hand wipe magnate Pierce Hawthorne. Sure, he might have died of dehydration filling up thermoses of sperm, but now he’s around forever on Greendale’s campus giving lectures about sexual harassment. Pierce, as a character, was always a bit nuts, but in the sense that the rich, like the gods, can be eccentric and get a little more leeway. It’s a more quotidian use of holography than entertaining crowds with long-dead rappers, but for real-life magnates with some cash to burn, why not leave a lifelike Pepper’s ghost behind for future scions?